Ultimate Cars - Racers - Auto Union C-Type

" 6-liter, 16-cylinder, fire-breathing monster. It was akin to using a space rocket."

" Here's all you need to know about the Auto Union. In 1937, it reached 252 miles per hour on the German Autobahn."

" [unk]"

" That's right, 252 miles per hour in 1937. For heaven's sake, it's 11 miles faster than the fastest road car in the world, the McLaren F1. Unfortunately, all but one of the cars were destroyed during the war, so the amount of people who have had the opportunity to see one of these legends close up is very limited, and you are about to become one of them. In fact, you are about to hear for the first time an Auto Union engine built by a small group of mechanics in the south of England. This is a very special moment── which, we may have to come back for. As we all now know, in principle, building a racing car is easy. You take an enormous engine and stick it into the lightest body possible. But when the engine is a 16-valve, 520-brake horsepower, 5000-rounds-per-minute monster of an engine, making that concept a reality is far from easy."

" The crank shaft length has over 1000 compartments in it, and that gives you some indication of the level of engineering that went into this car."

" And honest to God, it sounds amazing."

" Really. This is worth the wait, I promise. But the biggest engine in the world, even if it has got 1000 parts in the crank shaft, is no good to anyone unless someone is willing to drive it. But the mid-engine layout with the driver placed in front of the engine as opposed to behind the engine was such a radical departure from racing convention that the only people who could race the cars were ex-motorbike riders, because like a motorbike, the best way to take a corner in an Auto Union is to let the back end slide out, like this."

" If you think what the Auto Union proposition was, that you'd have a 6-liter, 16-cylinder engine producing nearly 600 horsepower, that's the sort of thing that you wouldn't see in Formula 1 until the 1980s in a car where you cannot strap in at all. You don't have any nice carbon fiber cocoon around you. You are sitting on this car and you're trying to put this power onto a track through wheels which would look much more in place in your bicycle than what you think of as a modern racing car, and they do 200 miles an hour without any problem and often did it in the rain, and it is just extraordinary think that I even thought it was a good idea to sit on these things, but they did, and it made heroes out of all of them."

" Heroes each and every one of them. These were the kind of men who's spat in the face of danger. We'll go to this one, he's smoking. Wooh, wohhoohoo! The Auton Union C-type is one of the great engineering feats of the 20th Century. It was capable of reaching hair-raising speeds and it was driven by nothing less than heroes. So why is it only number 3 on our list?"

" It was very hot in the car because on the side you have these water pumps running and you could not touch with your hands because it was boiling. Often, they have bloody hands after races because of the, the steering wheel was always moving and so on."

" Because the physical demands on the drivers were Herculean, the wheels were too thin, and the metal components couldn't stand up to the force of the engine, the car was just a terrifying prospect to drive. All the same, it sounds amazing."

" How does it sound boys?"